[Xerte-dev] Re: Topics and subtopics?

[Smith, John]

Hi Brad,

I think it would be a relatively simple thing to do to add an optional property called "subpage" (which is a tickbox) for every page type and then in the menu.html model (and xenith.js) you would use that whilst parsing the pages to ensure that it looks that way while maintaining the integrity of the existing pages.

Also you would build in checks for things that don't make sense like page 1 cant be a subpage so that property would be ignored etc... Also you might want to add a numbering option to the main LO such as Subpage numbering None/A,B,C/1,2,3/a,b,c/i,ii,iii etc...

Regards,

John Smith | Learning Technologist
Room A250, Govan Mbeki Building | School of Health & Life Sciences | Glasgow Caledonian University
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From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, Bradley [brsmith at akamai.com]
Sent: 08 December 2014 20:32
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Topics and subtopics?

Hello all,

At first I was going to send this to the regular xerte list, but if the answer to my question is what I think it is, this will be a better audience.

I’ve set up Xerte and work and started developing content in it. Many of my colleagues use tools like Articulate and Storyline, and from what I’ve seen of the materials they create, one thing I expect they’ll want to know when I show them Xerte is “how do I create subtopics?” (as shown in the attached screenshot, which is from an internal course, so I’ve blurred out some content).

These tools give you the option to put an entire course into one SCO (or whatever), whereas, unless I’m missing something big, Xerte seems to assume that all the pages in an XOT will pertain to a single topic, and a large course will be a collection of separate XOTs, one per topic. I’ve been able to approximate subtopics using tabbed navigators, but those limit the kinds of content you can include.

Keeping content “atomic” with one topic per piece of content is a practice I would like to see encouraged, but I think it’s also reasonable to want to be able to present multiple topics in a single package, so…

First question: am I missing something?

Assuming I’m not missing anything, some follow-ups: would I encounter any objections if I tried to implement a way to do this? (no promises! just thinking out loud at this point). Have there been any efforts to implement this sort of feature that I should know about?

I think if I was going to try to implement something like this, instead of implementing topics and subtopics per se, I would want to look into the possibility of integrating existing XOTs into a larger “container” page. For example, create one XOT per topic in a sort of library hosted in Xerte, and what goes in your course is a container XOT that pulls content from an arbitrary number of topic Los in the library, treating each one as a topic in its TOC, like the section headings in that screen shot. This would both allow for more comprehensive XOTs, and truly re-usable content, something that IMO not enough content creation/management tools emphasize.

People who understand templates and the guts of XOTs better than me (I.e. just about everyone): is the above doomed? Or maybe possible?

—Brad


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